When the Danube Ran Red

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41 7 Options As time went by, it was more and more obvious that school had lost its importance in my life, while music would become of the most essential , shaping significance. I became serious about playing the piano. From the age of eight, I practiced two to three hours every day and listened to music all the time. I even played chamber music with my father’s quartet on Sunday afternoons, enjoying our performances tremendously . And if, after a while, the thought of moving to Budapest started to seem bearable to me, it was so not only because I knew by then that Erzsi, Anni, and Grandfather would live there as well, but also because my father found a teacher for me in the capital, one of the greatest pianists of the time in Hungary: György (Gyuri) Faragó, a dashingly attractive young man, with blond curly hair, blue eyes, and a beautifully shaped, intelligent face. He had won the first prize in the International Piano Competition of Luxemburg a few years before. We listened to his recordings all the time and, whenever we traveled to Budapest, we went to his concerts as well. Despite my new interest developing beyond the world of Békéscsaba , saying farewell to Márta and Juti was very difficult. I felt a terrible emptiness without them and could not imagine that anyone could ever substitute for them, that I could ever forget our relationship or find anything comparable to it. Hoping to stay close and continue our friendship , we decided to visit one another regularly in the future. Despite our best intentions, however, we met just once more in our lives: when I spent two weeks in Békéscsaba in July 1942. During the summer of When the Danube R an Red 42 1943, we missed seeing each other altogether. I went to the mountains with my mother, and both of them went visiting relatives. Unbeknownst to all of us, however, this was our last chance to be together. On March 19, 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary, and from that time on, each of us ran for her life. Of course, in August–September 1941, we did not know what was in the making. Although the news of the Germans’ torture and massacres of the Jews had been known in Hungary for years, the scope and inevitability of the Final Solution were not yet recognized by most people. While Jews like my parents had a sense of the impending catastrophe, their concerns and visions, especially those of my father, especially before my uncle’s murder on the front, were, I believe, suppressed most of the time in order to live and fulfill the task of raising, supporting, nourishing, and teaching their children, whose everyday lives demanded active and caring parents. After the three of us returned from Szabadka in the late summer of 1941, my parents placed us in a boarding school in Budapest, while they started to prepare for our move. They were looking forward to the good and productive life they hoped to secure for us in the capital. My mother was now happy as well. Knowing that my grandfather and Anni would be near us, she looked forward to our life in the city. Iván and I arrived there within two weeks, moving to 10 Abonyi Street, across from the Jewish high school, a red-stone building with an outstanding library and a first-class faculty. Erzsi, on the other hand, took a small apartment in Buda, close to her workplace. She got a job in the bicycle shop belonging to my father and his friend Louis, and we saw her only on Sundays. That was hard. But when she came, we played with one another as passionately and as happily as we used to play in Békéscsaba. The rumors of the brutal treatment of the Jews on the Soviet front would not subside, however. In fact, we heard about the anguish of the labor servicemen again and again, and became aware of the drafting and service on the front of several of my schoolmates’ fathers. After a Options 43 while, people started to whisper about mass shootings of children, men, and women into pits in the Ukraine. I was horrified. Suddenly Budapest was buzzing with these stories. At this point, I could not avoid hearing them, nor could my parents hide them...